Radical optical router delivers super-fast internet

MIT researchers have developed technology that they say will make the internet 100 to 1000 times faster and could make high-speed data access a lot cheaper.

The trick to such dramatic performance gains lies within the routers that direct traffic on the internet, according to Vincent Chan, an electrical engineering and computer science professor at MIT, who led the research team. Chan says replacing electrical signals inside the routers with faster optical signals would make the internet 100 times — if not 1000 times — faster, while also reducing the amount of energy it consumes.

What would the internet be like if it ran that much faster? Today, a user who has a hard time downloading a 100MB file would be able to easily send a 10GB file, according to Chan.

With increasingly powerful computer processors and bandwidth-hungry applications, the internet will reach a "choke point" within three to five years, Chan believes.